Bulk product manufacturers are known to use large barrels to hold and transport their products, each barrel being capable of holding up to five hundred pounds of cheese or other bulk flowable product. Several types of barrels are known in the art for packaging these bulk products, including steel barrels, government fiber drums or corrugated cardboard barrels. Among the prior art barrels, the corrugated cardboard barrels are the least expensive, require the least amount of shipping and/or storage space, and are easily disposed of.
One popular type of corrugated cardboard barrel is designed to be formed into an octagon shape to facilitate efficient stacking of the barrels. Typically, the barrels are provided to the cheese manufacturer (hereinafter "customer") in bundles of flat cardboard "blanks" which must be manually set-up by the customer to form upright barrels suitable for storing the customer's product. The customer typically sets up the barrels by folding the blank along eight vertical score lines to form the eight sides of the octagonally-shaped barrel, inserting an octagonal pad between the sides of the barrel to hold it open, forming the bottom of the barrel by folding and snap-locking the bottom flaps into place, turning over the barrel and then inserting liners into the barrels. The barrels are typically set-up several at a time and then "staged", or stored in the factory or warehouse until they are ready to be filled with cheese or other flowable products. After the barrels are filled with the customer's product, the customer must hand-seal the containers with either tape or glue.
The present system of cheese packaging is time consuming, requiring the customer's employees to expend several manhours of labor that could be more productively allocated to other tasks. The process of manually setting up the cheese barrels also inevitably results in a certain amount of employee injuries and accidents which unnecessarily add to the customer's labor costs. Moreover, the process of staging barrels associated with the present system creates an inefficient use of factory or warehouse space inasmuch as the space utilized to stage the barrels could potentially be allocated to more productive uses. Each of these problems either directly or indirectly results in increasing the customer's production costs.
The present invention is directed to overcoming or at least reducing the effects of one or more of the problems set forth above by providing a novel cheese barrel design that is adapted for machine assembly. The cheese barrel eliminates the bottom pad associated with the prior art and reinforces the bottom of the cheese barrel to provide added burst strength and added stacking strength. Because of the increased strength associated with the present invention, the cheese barrel may be manufactured using cardboard having less weight than prior art corrugated cheese barrels. Moreover, the cheese barrel according to the present invention is adapted for machine assembly, which enables labor and production costs to be reduced below that of present systems.